Readers who expect a conventional ethnography of ‘The Hakkas of Sarawak’ (à la Ju-K'ang Tien's The Chinese of Sarawak) will be disappointed by this monograph, but anthropologists, historians, and political scientists interested in the intersections of global, national and local histories, in the historical memory of ethnic minorities marginalised and victimised by the nation-state, and in how such communities cope with collective trauma should focus on its subtitle (Sacrificial gifts in Cold War era Malaysia) and will find this an intellectually engaging — and politically engaged — ethnography that combines committed scholarship with deep, reflective analysis.

The Hakkas have a long history of social exclusion and resistance to state authority. Sometimes mislabelled as the ‘gypsies of China’, they are believed to have migrated from northern China into the south where they were regarded as outsiders (their name means ‘guest families’) and played a leading role in the nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion against the Qing dynasty. The Hakkas were also prominent among the Chinese pioneers who migrated to Southeast Asia in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The earliest Chinese settlements in the archipelago date back to 1777 when the Sultan of Sambas in West Borneo invited Hakkas to work in his gold mines. It did not take long for them to make themselves independent of the Sultan and set up their own government, the Lanfang Republic, sometimes disparaged as a secret society kongsi, and sometimes idealised as Asia's first modern republic. When the Dutch began to assert control over this part of Borneo in the mid-nineteenth century, many Hakkas migrated northwards to areas beyond Dutch control where they continued mining gold as well as antimony in Sarawak. After the Sarawak Raja James Brooke imposed taxes on the lucrative opium trade and set up a mining company to take over the mining operation, they rebelled in 1857 and attacked his capital Kuching. The Raja made a narrow escape and managed to rally local Iban warriors to counterattack and massacre many Hakkas. A century later the Hakkas of Sarawak once again appear in historical accounts of the time as dangerous outsiders, this time as communist collaborators and sympathisers during the 1960s Konfrontasi, the Cold War front in Borneo.

That is how the Hakkas conventionally appear in historical accounts, but Kee Howe Yong is an anthropologist endeavouring to write their unwritten history based on the living memories of the trauma of simultaneous inclusion in (through forced resettlement) and exclusion from (as suspected communists) the nation-state. Rather than dwelling on the history of the Hakkas, Yong seeks to convey an understanding of what it feels like to live in today's Malaysia with the historical baggage of past exclusion and victimisation.

Yong conducted fieldwork mainly at bus stations, coffee shops and in buses among drivers, conductors and other employees of the local bus company. That may sound like the beginning of most anthropological fieldwork, but in this book it is also its end. He chose the Sarawak Omnibus Company as his fieldwork site not only because of the pioneering role that Chinese traders and transport operators played in connecting Sarawak, but also because it came into existence when small-scale Chinese bus operators who had competed against each other merged their operations and formed the first and biggest bus company in Sarawak. The company in turn had close links to the first political party in Sarawak, the Sarawak United Peoples Party (SUPP), which was formed in 1959 in response to Chinese concerns over their place after independence. The company and the party were among the first expressions of Chinese, and specifically Hakka, organised economic and political interests in the context of the emerging nation-state of Malaysia.

The author describes how during the Konfrontasi the Hakkas collectively fell victim to the state's suspicions of Chinese communists. Ostensibly to protect them from the communist threat in rural areas, they were forcefully resettled in so-called New Villages where they could be controlled and kept under watch. The New Villages and other ‘help’ they received in the name of development and modernisation were the ‘gift in Cold War Era Malaysia’ given to them by the state referred to in the book's subtitle. Yong interprets state-driven development as a Maussian poisonous gift, a suffocating embrace of its marginalised minorities by the centralised and homogenising nation-state. An intriguing line of thought, but one that needs to be developed more systematically than the somewhat sketchy analysis in the book.

In the post-Cold War Mahathirist Malaysia of the 1990s, the Sarawak Omnibus Company entered into a partnership with a Bumiputra company and transformed itself into a corporate organisation run by a new generation of neo-liberal managers and entrepreneurs. Among the most interesting parts of the book are the insights into the tensions and conflicts that arose out of the corporatisation of a Chinese business partnership which transformed not only relations between the employees and the company management but also between the employees themselves. In this new world of large corporations and the developmentalist state, there is no place for memories of past injustices and suffering.

It was in this context of the late 1990s that Yong conducted his research to uncover and recover the 1960s memories of his interlocutors' traumatic past as communists or suspected communists, memories of which, he found, they did not want to be reminded. This ethnography is as much about what his informants did not tell the anthropologist as it is one about what they did tell him. It is therefore an ethnography about silences and the attempts by the anthropologist to break these silences. It documents the struggle between anthropologist and informants, their tactics of keeping silent about these memories, and his counter-tactics trying to make them talk about their traumatic past. It is an ethnography of memory, particularly painful and traumatic memory, and it is also an ethnography of forgetting in a new world in which one seems better off forgetting memories that have come to appear as obstacles to the progress and development of the individual and the nation.

Apart from hitting the reader from time to time with unexpected quotes from the higher authorities of postmodernism that are not always woven well into the text, this work is an important contribution that raises new perspectives in the history and ethnography of the Chinese diaspora in Borneo and beyond by approaching it through the anthropology of collective trauma processing.